Russian Torrent Tracker to Let Rights Holders Moderate Torrents

The largest torrent tracker in Russia and CIS countries announced that it is ready to take extraordinary measures to avoid being permanently blocked by Internet service providers. RuTracker, the 17th largest site in Russia, promised to give copyright holders a special account with moderating rights.

A few days ago, the local telecoms watchdog marked the 2-year anniversary of the amendment to copyright legislation. Over this period, the watchdog received 189 copyright-related complaints from copyright owners and restricted access to 282 online services. Of course, they include torrent websites like The Pirate Bay. Now the question was raised about the Russia’s most popular torrent tracker.

RuTracker was known as Torrents.ru before a controversial domain seizure 5 years ago. After a few weeks, the site was back with a new domain name and remained the biggest torrent tracker in the country with a thriving community. According to Alexa ranking, RuTracker is today the 17th most popular site in Russia, and therefore can’t go unnoticed by the copyright holders.

When the National Federation of the Music Industry (a group including Sony, Universal, Warner and EMI as members) tried to negotiate with RuTracker over the removal of copyrighted content, they got no reply and decided to initiate a legal action. However, now RuTracker announced that it is ready to cooperate with NFMI in order to avoid a nationwide blockade. The site operators explained that they are ready to even go way beyond standard takedown requests, by giving copyright holders torrent moderation rights on the site.

RuTracker currently supports Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh and Belarusian languages. However, English speakers are also enjoying the tracker in increasing numbers using Google Translate, because most movies on the site contain original audio tracks.

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Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article.

Posted by:  SaM